Trick for the Shockers? Seeing only IU red -- and not KU red and blue
OMAHA, Neb. -- Rock Chalk this, Perry Ellis that, yada yada yada. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again ...
Wichita State guard Tekele Cotton has lost count of how many times he's been asked about Kansas since the curtain got lifted on the NCAA Tournament brackets Sunday night.
Actually, he stopped counting.
"A handful," Cotton admitted with a grin. "But ... we'll focus on Kansas once the time comes.
"I mean, you heard it a lot, but you've just got to have tunnel vision when it comes to that. Just focus on what you have in front of you."
What they have in front of them is Indiana (20-13), the KU of the Great Lakes, where the ghost of Bob Knight haunts every corner of Bloomington, even though the aforementioned Knight isn't, well, dead.
It's the kind of "name brand" school you dream about playing in March when you're forward Evan Wessel, having grown up in Wichita a third-generation Shocker, that chip on the shoulder toward the old-money club passed down from overlooked generation to overlooked generation to overlooked generation.
"We're playing Indiana -- their tradition ranks up there as the best in college basketball," said Wessel, whose seventh-seeded Shox (28-4) tussle with the 10th-seeded Hoosiers (20-13) on Friday in the Big Dance opener for both. "And they're a great team. They had a great season. They're really talented, and that's all we're really focused on right now. We want to win.
"If you try to overlook someone, or look on to the next game, that's when you slip up."
He pointed to the score flashing in a crawl on the television above a reporter's shoulder: 14-seed UAB 60, 3-seed Iowa State 59.
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"We don't want that," Wessel stressed, "to be us."
As recently as six or seven years ago, this is a different game in a different context: Wichita a scrappy double-digit bunch trying to shock the world, the Hoosiers the bluest of bloods, a big fish in any pond.
But since the 2008-09 season, the roles -- and their positions in the college basketball pecking order -- have flipped somewhat. Over the past seven seasons, Indiana has reached Bracketville three times; Wichita State, four. IU coach Tom Crean has won 24 games or more twice; Shockers coach Gregg Marshall has pulled it off six times. The Hoosiers have two Sweet 16s but no Final Fours; the Shox have one of each.
Wichita is favored Friday, too.
So it's easy to imagine Indiana's faithful feeling a little hard done-by, given the current state of affairs. Or confused. Or, what the hell, both.
"If they want to think that, we'll let 'em," Wessel said. "We love to play with a chip on their shoulder. I think that helps us a lot.
"I think we look pretty focused. A lot of these guys, it's their first NCAA Tournament. But it's my fourth. It's other guys' third and fourth. So it's kind of a combination (of experience). But I like where we're at."
Friday's winner gets the Jayhawks or, if current Big 12 form holds, New Mexico State. But it's Marshall's challenge, his primary hurdle, to make sure his kids are seeing red Friday.
And only red.
"We have been very diligent with our approach in terms of trying to beat the Hoosiers," Marshall assured reporters. "We do have one (assistant) that is privately working on Kansas. I don't think that Kansas' name has come up one time. So the hubbub is out here (in the press), and we're pretty insulated and we're doing our thing right now, trying to beat the team that wears the red and white -- not the blue, red and white."
It's crimson and cream, technically, but the point still stands.
"We used the term 'focus' because it's a one-game, one-possession deal we're facing," Shockers guard Ron Baker noted. "I recall being in the Final Four (in 2013), I remember each game in that tournament, none of us knew who the 3 or the 4 seed was in that bracket we were in. We were just focusing on the target, and that was our opponent at that time."
Any other year, in any other bracket, the Hoosiers would be the banner headline, the main course, not the appetizer. Indiana is the eighth-most "valuable" college basketball program in America according to Forbes.com (Kansas checked in at No. 2, Mizzou at No. 20), with a revenue of $28 million and profit of $17 million in the 2013-14 fiscal year. Assembly Hall remains one of the jewels of basketball, where five national championship banners seem to sway when the place starts rocking.
But it's also a wobbly giant at the moment, a young team lacking in size and mojo whose coach has been shuffling on and off the hot seat since Valentine's Day. One day, Crean is beating the posse outta Dodge to take over the vacancy at Alabama. The next, he isn't.
It's hard to tell these days what's circling faster in Bloomington, the wagons or the buzzards.
"When the ball goes up, there's not really any rankings out there," Wessel said. "Just who wins that game."
In his Division I coaching career, Marshall has been stacked against so-called "bluebloods" -- programs that have been to at least 20 NCAA tourneys -- six times before Friday. The Shockers' boss has knocked off two (Notre Dame with Winthrop; Ohio State with Wichita) and been sent home by four (Oklahoma and Tennessee with Winthrop; Louisville and Kentucky with Wichita).
At Omaha, he could even the score. But you don't get to take out two without the one first.
"You can't overlook Indiana," Cotton said, then grinned again. Slightly. "I mean, they're Indiana."
You can follow Sean Keeler on Twitter at @SeanKeeler or email him at seanmkeeler@gmail.com.
